Tag: China

Taiwan Accuses China Over One Child Policy

Taiwan claims that China is pressuring Chinese women who are pregnant by Taiwanese husbands to abort their pregnancies as part of China’s one-child policy.

China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province. In the 1990s, contacts between Taiwan and China increased dramatically leading to as many as 150,000 marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese citizens.

Taiwan, however, has a strict immigration policy that allows only 3,600 Chinese per year to permanently settle on the island. According to Taiwan, pregnant women who have returned back to China have been threatened and harassed into having abortions or sterilization procedures.

Taiwan has responded by extending the temporary permits that Chinese women use to visit the island long enough to cover their pregnancies. Taiwan maintains taht since the infants woudl have Taiwanese residency that the one-child

Source:

Taiwan and China in abortion row. The BBC, July 18, 2002.

Hong Kong Population Could Reach 8.7 Million

Many people think Hong Kong’s 1,000 square kilometers is already a bit overcrowded with its existing 6.7 million people. But projections released by China’s Census and Census and Statistics department suggest the city will add another two million people over the next 30 years.

The major cause for the increase will be immigrants, who will represent 93 percent of the increase. China allows almost 55,000 people from the mainland to emigrate to Hong Kong each year.

Source:

Hong Kong population set to swell. The BBC, May 7, 2002.

Attempts to Control Chicken Influenza Failing in Hong Kong

In 1997, a strain of avian flu jumped the species barrier and infected 18 people in Hong Kong, killing 6 of them. When tests found the flu spreading among Hong Kong chickens, the entire population of more than one million chickens was slaughtered in an effort to wipe out the disease.

But the avian flu returned in 2002 and hundreds of thousands of chickens have died and been slaughtered.

Research into samples of the 2001 and 2002 viruses show that the latest virus is indeed based on the pervious year’s version — efforts to eradicate the disease failed.

At least one research in Hong Kong, microbiologist Guan Yi, says the only solution is to close all live chicken farms in Hong Kong and ban the importation of live chickens from China. “I believe we have to get rid of the farms, and the poultry markets, and the import of fresh chickens,” Guan told China Daily.

Peter Wong Chun-kow, the Hong Kong president of the World’s Poultry Science Association, rejected that idea, telling China Daily that, “Avian influenza is just like any human flu — you just cannot get rid of it. However, it does not make sense to get rid of the poultry industry to get rid of the bird flu. That would be an ignorant act.”

The real problem here is China. Almost all chickens sold either live or ready for sale in Hong Kong are imported from China — only about 20 percent of chicken sold in Hong Kong actually originates from Hong Kong.

China is notoriously inept at efforts to track the origination of the influenza outbreaks. Not only does China not keep accurate records of outbreaks that would allow researchers to trace back the source of new strains of influenza, but even when China has a habit of denying that there is any new strain of influenza even to the point of denying that its farmers have been forced to slaughter chickens when it is easy to confirm that such actions have, in fact, occurred.

Time reported that when there were reports of an avian flue outbreak and the slaughter of chickens in China’s Fujian province, the response of the Chinese government was simply to deny everything.

The situation is so bad that if live chickens from China are refused by Hong Kong because the avian flu is detected, the chickens are simply slaughtered, repackaged as frozen, and re-exported back to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s problem is less with chickens than it is with the politicians in China who do not want to take responsibility for eradicating the avian influenza.

Source:

Hong Kong’s Fowl Problem: Hong Kong’s latest bird flu scare points to a lack of Chinese cooperation. Davena Mok, Time Asia, February 18, 2002.

Hong Kong chicken flu slaughter “failed”. Emma Young, New Scientist, April 19, 2002.

Man in China Sues Wife for Having an Abortion

The BBC reports that in March a man in China became the first to file a lawsuit under a new law in that country that guarantees both men and women equal say in having children.

As part of its extreme family planning policies, China approved a law that makes both spouses in a marriage equally responsible for family planning decisions. In this case, a man his wife because she aborted her pregnancy despite his desire to see her carry the pregnancy to term.

The law was apparently passed due to concern that the brunt of enforcement of China’s one-child policy was falling largely on women. Health experts called on men to take more active of a role, and the government responded with a law granting men and women equal legal status in making decisions about when to have children.

The BBC reports that a Chinese court recommended that the man’s lawsuit be allowed to proceed.

Chinese man sues wife over abortion. Vickie Maximova, The BBC, March 20, 2002.

The United States Should Withhold Family Planning Money Over China

Columnist Chris Weinkopf recently surveyed the controversy over the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Fund and makes a compelling case that the U.S. President George W. Bush should withhold all $34 million allocated for that purpose by Congress.

Normally the authorization for the UNFPA funding includes a provision that deducts from the total however much the UNFPA uses in China. So if Congress approves $30 million and the UNFPA spends $2 million in China, the amount the United States gives the UNFPA would be $28 million.

When the Congress passed funding for then UNFPA in December 2001, however, it removed that automatic provision and instead left it to the president’s discretion to decide how much of the $34 million actually makes its way to the UNFPA.

At a minimum, Bush should withhold an amount equal to what the UNFPA plans to spend in China. The United States should not subsidize China’s hideous one-child policy.

Source:

Where “Choice” and “Life” Should Agree, but Don’t. Chris Weinkopf, FrontPageMagazine.Com, January 30, 2002.

China’s Bizarre Ban on Condom Advertising

For a country that officially bars many couples from having more than one children, you might think that China would promote contraception measures such as condoms. You would be mistaken. Believe it or not, The State Administration for Industry and Commerce has banned advertising for condoms since 1989 under regulations that prohibit “any products meant to cure sexual dysfunction or help improve people’s sex life.”

The ban is enforced to the point that when China Central Television ran a public service announcement in 1999 touting condoms for birth control and disease prevention, the ads were quickly taken off the air. One of the effects of such a bizarre policy is that China may be in the midst of a runaway HIV epidemic.

Officially there are already 600,000 HIV positive persons in China, though international health agencies suspect that number might be as high as 1 million. Moreover, the number of cases is quickly accelerating. The number of official cases jumped 67 percent from 2000 to 2001.

Surveys of Chinese attitudes toward HIV reveal that few people in China know much about the disease. In a study conducted in 2000 by the State Family Planning Commission, 20 percent of those surveyed had never heard of AIDS, and 50 percent did not know that the disease could be transmitted by sex.

Chinese media, including the official Communist Party organ The People’s Daily recently called for a lifting of the ban on condom advertising. Hopefully the government will follow suit and begin a massive education campaign about and allow such advertising, or China could face the sort of pandemic that is now afflicting sub-Saharan Africa.

Source:

With ignorance as the fuel, AIDS speeds across China. Elisabeth Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 30, 2001.

China lets condoms out of the closet. John Schauble, TheAge.Com, January 1, 2002.